Double the fun: Peter Schiff versus Occupy Wall Street, round two

AllahpunditPosted at 3:25 pm on October 27, 2011

Yesterday’s crowd-pleaser from MRC TV was just an appetizer. Here’s the main course via Reason — almost 19 minutes of Schiff taking on all comers at Zuccotti Park like some sort of Austrian-school ninja. Watch for the part where he breaks out the rhetorical nunchucks against regulation on grounds that everyone wants to pay lower prices for goods and is duly informed by a guy in a Guy Fawkes mask and keffiyeh that … no, not everyone does. There’s your “Obama 2012” campaign slogan, I guess.

Elsewhere in the park, the revolution might not be televised but apparently it will be catered. With one caveat: You only get to eat if you’re doing something productive for the cause, like drumming 15 hours a day. You see, the people’s mess hall doesn’t have time for … freeloaders.

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday — because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.

They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day…

Today, a limited menu of sandwiches, chips and some hot food will be doled out — so legitimate protesters will have a day to make arrangements for more upscale weekend meals.

In other words, a guy with no job who’s been sleeping in the park for a month and prone to saying things like “power to the people” is entitled to feast on sheep’s-milk-cheese salad, but a guy with no job who’s been sleeping in the park for years and prone to saying things like “I’m hungry” has to make do with whatever the local soup kitchen is shoveling. Some occupiers really are more equal than others.

Be sure to read to the end of the Post’s article for details on the confrontation between OWS’s self-appointed security team and the “trouble-prone southwest section of Zuccotti Park,” which is troublesome enough that some women have reportedly abandoned the protest in fear for their own safety. (No one knows how bad it is inside because there’s an informal “stop snitching” policy that’s intimidating people into not reporting crimes.) Zuccotti Park isn’t that big so some of this must be going on right under the NYPD’s nose, yet for political reasons, Bloomberg and the landlord are apparently content to let the movement’s own “security volunteers” handle it rather than risk a confrontation by intervening themselves. Disgraceful, and needless to say, the outrage it would inspire if the protesters’ politics were different would be apocalyptic. As it is, if someone does get seriously hurt in there, they should sue every city official and agency in sight — Bloomberg, Ray Kelly, straight down the line. They might not win but the shame alone will be worth it.